Background Technical, nonengineering required courses taken at the onset of an engineering degree provide students a foundation for engineering coursework. Students who perform poorly in these foundational courses, even in those tailored to engineering, typically have limited success in engineering. A profile approach may explain why these courses are obstacles for engineering students. This approach examines the interaction among motivation and self‐regulation constructs. Purpose (Hypothesis) This project sought to determine what motivational and self‐regulated learning profiles engineering students adopt in foundational courses. We hypothesized that engineering students would adopt profiles associated with maladaptive motivational beliefs and self‐regulated learning behaviors. The effects of profile adoption on learning and differences associated with student major, minor, and gender were analyzed. Design/Method Five hundred and thirty‐eight students, 332 of them engineering majors, were surveyed on motivation and self‐regulation variables. Data were analyzed from a learner‐centered profile approach using cluster analysis. Results We obtained a five‐cluster learning profile solution. Approximately 83% of engineering students enrolled in an engineering‐tailored foundational computer science course adopted maladaptive profiles. These students learned less than those who adopted adaptive learning profiles. Profile adoption depended on whether a student was considering a major or minor in computer science or not. Conclusions Findings indicate the motivational and self‐regulated learning profiles that engineering students adopt in foundational courses, why they do so, and what profile adoption means for learning. Our findings can guide instructors in providing motivational beliefs and self‐regulated learning scaffolds in the classroom.

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This article reports an investigation of a professional development program to enhance elementary teachers’ ability to engage their students in argument from evidence in science. Using a quasi-experimental approach, three versions were compared: Version A—a 1-week summer institute with a 2-week summer practicum experience and 8 follow-up days (four per year), Version B without the practicum experience, and Version C—a revision of Version A in Year 3. All teachers were videoed twice each year, and the videos were rated using an instrument to measure the quality of discourse. All versions led to a significant improvement in teachers’ facilitation of classroom discourse. Neither the practicum nor the revised program had an additional effect. Implications for the field are discussed.

Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) frequently experience significant difficulty mastering basic academic skills. This meta-analysis focuses on one specific potential area of learning difficulties for these students: namely, writing. To identify the extent and depth of the potential writing challenges faced by students with ADHD, we conducted a meta-analysis comparing the writing performance of grade 1 to 12 students with ADHD to their normally achieving peers. We located 44 papers, yielding 45 studies with 87 effect sizes. The average weighted effect sizes showed that students with ADHD obtained lower scores than their normally achieving peers for writing quality (-0.78), output (-0.64), number of genre elements (-0.69), vocabulary (-0.76), spelling (-0.80), and handwriting (-0.62). Contrary to expectations, moderator analyses found that neither study quality nor the source from which ADHD students were drawn (i.e., school/community vs. clinic/hospital) accounted for variability above sampling error alone.

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